Android has released the fifth and final developer preview for Android Wear 2.0 today, so those who have compiled their applications for this preview can finally publish their apps.
This developer preview comes with added iOS support and a number of bug fixes and enhancements. Now, developers can distribute their apps to iPhone-paired watches. Developers have been able to pair Android Wear watches with iPhones since 2015, but the added iOS support allows them to just set the standalone=true flag in their watch app manifest, according to developer advocate Hoi Lam in an Android Developers blog post.
Lam writes that this developer preview release allows Android Wear apps “running on watches paired with iOS devices will be able to perform phone hand-off flows such as OAuth and RemoteIntent for launching a web page on a paired iOS device,” said Lam.
(Related: Google describes how it improved Android security)
As developers count down to launch, they can check out the update to the Wearable Support Library included in this developer preview. Apps compiled at API level 25 are considered ready for deployment to the Google Play Store, wrote Lam.
Developers can also check out enhancements and bugfixes like the Navigation Drawer, which provides faster and streamlined navigation to different views in an app, according to Lam. There’s also the ProGuard and Complication API, which means complicated data container classes will no longer be obfuscated, he wrote.
The Android Wear 2.0 consumer launch is expected in early February, so developers should consider filing bugs and publishing their apps before then.
